How Perpetrators Make Themselves the Vicitms: "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender" (DARVO)

It's a well-known feature of perpetrators that they generally deny what they have done, attack the accusers (often attempting to destroy their character), and then reverse the situation so that they claim to be the victims.

If you have any doubt about this, look closely at EVERY situation in which Marc Gafni has been accused of sexually inappropriate relationships with his students (often two or more at a time), which includes forcing them to lie about the relationships and controlling their contact with others outside his circle of trust.

Psychologist Jennifer J. Freyd, at the University of Oregon, has detailed this behavior in a model she calls DARVO = Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. What follows comes from her web page on this topic. Freyd is one of the world's experts on betrayal trauma.

Her books include:

• Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (2013)
• Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (1998, reprint edition)

Citation:
Freyd, J.J. (2014). What is DARVO? Retrieved 5.28.2015 from http://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/defineDARVO.html.

What is DARVO?

Jennifer J. Freyd, University of Oregon

Short Definition

DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim -- or the whistle blower -- into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of "falsely accused" and attacks the accuser's credibility or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation. 

Disclaimers

• DARVO as a concept is based on observation and analysis. The author has not completed systematic empirical research testing the coherence or frequency of DARVO. However, research is currently in progress in the author's laboratory at the University of Oregon.
• Other observers have likely noted the same phenomena and related phenomena using different terms; the author has been informed that some people have found the term DARVO a helpful mnemonic and organizing concept.
• Also the presence of DARVO is not necessarily evidence in support of the accusation of guilt; a truly innocent person may deny an accusation, attack the person making the accusation, or claim the victim role. Future research may be able to determine the probability of a DARVO response as a function of guilt or innocence. The author hypothesized that some sorts of denials and reactions such as DARVO are more likely when the perpetrator is guilty than innocent (Freyd, 1997); however this hypothesis has not yet been tested. Furthermore, even if research indicates that a DARVO reaction is more likely when there is actual guilt, it would be an error to use a DARVO reaction as proof of guilt.
• For now the concept of DARVO is offered as potentially memorable and useful term for anticipating the behavior of perpetrators when held accountable, and for making sense of responses that may otherwise be confusing (particularly when victim and offender get reversed). Research is needed.

History of Terminology & Writings about DARVO

Jennifer Freyd introduced the term "DARVO" near the end of a 1997 publication about her primary research focus, "betrayal trauma theory." (For more on betrayal trauma theory, see http://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/defineBT.html.)

The reference for the 1997 article introducing the term is:

Freyd, J.J. (1997) Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7, 22-32.

In that paper Freyd explained that DARVO responses may be effective for perpetrators. "...I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower's credicility, and so on..... [T]he offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed... The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense." (Freyd, 1997, p 29-30)

These ideas were further developed in an article by Veldhuis and Freyd (1999):

Veldhuis, C. B., & Freyd, J. J. (1999). Groomed for silence, groomed for betrayal. In M. Rivera (Ed.), Fragment by Fragment: Feminist Perspectives on Memory and Child Sexual Abuse (pp. 253-282). Charlottetown, PEI Canada: Gynergy Books.

In the 1999 article Veldhuis and Freyd explore the separate components of DARVO, and they also note a connection between DARVO and "betrayal blindness," a concept from betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996).

"By denying, attacking and reversing perpetrators into victims, reality gets even more confusing and unspeakable for the real victim. .... These perpetrator reactions increase the need for betrayal blindness. If the victim does speak out and gets this level of attack, she quickly gets the idea that silence is safer." (Veldhuis & Freyd, 1999. p 274).

Since then the concept of DARVO has appeared in various writings, the most significant of which is our new book Blind to Betrayal (Freyd & Birrell, 2013).

 
Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled

In Blind to Betrayal we urge institutions to cherish the whistle blower (see p. 173) and we offer suggestions for specific steps institutions can take to prevent and repair institutional betrayal. In Blind to Betrayal we also talk about institutional denial which plays such a crucial role in instutional betrayal. DARVO is a particularly pernicious form of denial (see p 119 of Blind to Betrayal).
Two Common Types of Denial

Two common forms of perpetrator (or bystander) denial are:

1. It didn't happen (an instance) or It rarely happens (a type of event)
2. It wasn't harmful

Put together they can take the form: "It didn't happen, but if it did, it wasn't that bad" or "It rarely happens, but when it does it isn't harmful." The two claims both serve to deny, but they depend upon different sorts of evidence. They may both be true, but they are sometimes somewhat suspicious when claimed simultaneously (or by the same person at different times), as for instance can occur in response to allegations of rape or child sexual abuse.

George Lakoff: How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis

Published on Apr 7, 2015

Keynote address recorded March 14, 2015 at the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science in Amsterdam.

Saturday, 14 March 2015


George Lakoff
Departments of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA

How do we answer the question, “How are thought and language constituted by the brain’s neural circuitry?” Neuroscience alone cannot answer this question. The field that studies the details of embodied conceptual systems and their expression in language is cognitive linguistics. In a book (in preparation with Srini Narayanan) we propose a neural computational “bridging model” as a way to answer the question. The talk gives illustrative details.

George Lakoff is a world-renowned cognitive linguist whose work reaches beyond the area of linguistics to provide groundbreaking insights into the realms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology as well. He is a pioneer in the multidisciplinary theory of the embodied mind, the idea that higher-order aspects of cognition are rooted in and constrained by bodily features such as the motor and perceptual systems. Additionally, his metaphor theory and insight into morally based framing, in which ideas are conveyed using very specific language that is tied to a larger conceptual framework such as freedom or equality, have made him a go-to strategist for politicians.

Read more about George Lakoff.

Books by George Lakoff that might be of interest.


Metaphors We Live By (2003, updated reissue)
Where Mathematics Comes From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being (2000)
Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)

Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin - The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin emailed me and suggested I might like to share his recent article, "The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution" (which originally appeared at Truthout).

While I tend to agree with Dr. Rubin, in part, I also have some issues about the generalizations in this article. A quote:

Meditation can lessen distractedness, quiet the inner pandemonium, reduce self-criticism and cultivate the capacity to tolerate a greater range of feelings. But emotions such as greed and hatred are viewed in some meditative traditions, such as classical Buddhism, as "defilements" and obstacles that interfere with experiencing a deeper reality. Meditators often try to quiet their minds so as to transcend or get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings, rather than learn what they might teach us. [italics mine]

If ANY teacher, therapist, doctor, or whoever, is teaching mindfulness as a way to "get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings" s/he have totally missed the point. The REAL point of meditation and mindfulness (thank you Pema Chödrön) is to learn how to sit with our suffering, to turn toward it and not away from it. That is how I learned it and how I teach it to my clients.

This is from Pema Chödrön's essay, "How to Tap into the Natural Warmth of Your Heart," which is included in A Pema Chödrön Primer, from The Shambhala Sun magazine.

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. Before these vulnerable feelings harden, before the storylines kick in, these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us. The openheartedness of natural warmth is sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant—as “I want, I like,” and as the opposite. The practice is to train in not automatically fleeing from uncomfortable tenderness when it arises. With time we can embrace it just as we would the comfortable tenderness of loving-kindness and genuine appreciation. [italics mine]

Anyone who is teaching mindfulness and meditation as anything other than a way to turn toward and embrace our most difficult feelings and thoughts is not teaching a Buddhist practice. This is the essential difference between Buddhist meditation and meditation as a tool for stress reduction - confusing the two is a serious mistake.

It's also a mistake to assume (as many Buddhists have) that meditation and mindfulness is all we need to heal our psychological wounds. This is nothing but a form of spiritual bypassing.

Buddhism offers some valuable insights and tools that can be a powerful adjunct to psychotherapeutic interventions, but they cannot replace the healing power of the intersubjective relationship with a good therapist. And, quite often, it can do nothing to heal the preverbal, somatic-level traumas of attachment failures.

That said, here is the article from Dr. Rubin.

The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

Sunday, 04 January 2015 | By Jeffrey B. Rubin, Truthout | Op-Ed 

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) 

In case we had any doubt after watching Anderson Cooper on "60 Minutes," mindfulness is the new yoga - and we are in the midst of a mindfulness revolution. It's been embraced by celebrities, business leaders, politicians and athletes; and recommended by doctors, clergy, psychotherapists and prison wardens. Apps and bestselling books touting the benefits of meditation proliferate. Google "mindfulness" and you'll get over 24 million hits.

It's not surprising that with unbridled enthusiasm about mindfulness come exaggerated claims and problems that are eclipsed. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the architects of the mindfulness revolution, claims mindfulness "has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance that . . . would put even the European and Italian Renaissance into the shade . . . [and] that may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years."

Backlash was inevitable. Critics are beginning to highlight the shaky foundations of the scientific claims of meditation's seemingly miraculous efficacy. After reviewing 18,000 scientific articles on meditation, the Association for Health and Research Quality at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a governmental organization that manages standards of research, declared in 2007 that future studies must be "more rigorous." In other words, the scientific evidence for the efficacy of meditation has been overstated and does not support the claims from evangelists of mindfulness about its benefits.

Buddhists have also pushed back, arguing that the mindfulness vogue has divorced meditation from its grounding in traditional Buddhist teachings.

But focusing on these problems with the McMindfulness craze obscures a more profound one - meditation neglects meaning. This not only opens the door to grave dangers, but also compromises meditation's radical potential.

I'm both a psychoanalyst and a long-time student - and now a teacher - of meditation. Over the years, I've witnessed the capacity of meditation to increase awareness, deepen compassion and cultivate wisdom. This is an immense gift for Western culture in general and psychotherapy in particular. But I've also seen how students and teachers of meditation alike grapple with unresolved emotional and interpersonal conflicts that meditation by itself sometimes doesn't touch, and in some cases hides.

The research of Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and one of the United States' most beloved Buddhist teachers, who interviewed nearly a hundred Buddhist teachers from a variety of traditions, supports this. He discovered that a significant number used psychotherapy to deal with psychological issues that meditation could not resolve. "Even the best meditators have old wounds to heal," Kornfield wrote in Bringing the Dharma Home: Awakening Right Where You Are. What he noticed in other Buddhist teachers, himself and his students, in over 40 years of teaching and practice, was that "meditation practice doesn't 'do it all.'" While wonderful, it often left untouched childhood wounds, unconscious fears, loneliness, poor self-care, troubles at work, and difficulties handling feelings and intimate relationships.

Meditation can transform our lives in powerful ways. But even after years of meditating, we may still be saddled with many of the same conflicts and inhibitions that plagued us before we began meditating. We may still be attracted to what is not good for us. We may still not have compassion for ourselves. We may still fear intimacy.

One explanation for this is that we are to blame. If only we would increase our dedication to meditation, learn to focus, and overcome our personal inadequacies, then perhaps we could change those things about ourselves that disturb us. Could this self-blaming explanation have reinforced the sense of inferiority that may have brought us to meditate in the first place - a troubling irony that perhaps too few Buddhists may contemplate?

A more accurate explanation for why meditators remain trapped within the same psychological conflicts after years of dedicated practice is that Buddhist meditation, like all techniques, is a tool that arose in particular contexts designed to handle specific challenges and not other ones. "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering," the Buddha is reputed to have said. Buddhist meditation was the technique the Buddha developed to handle the existential suffering he encountered when he escaped from his sheltered life within the palace compound in his mid-20s and witnessed, for the first time, old age, suffering and death. Profoundly distressed, even haunted, by the reality and inevitability of aging, misery and mortality, he abandoned his wife and child and initiated a spiritual quest that produced a set of teachings and practices whose central focus was eliminating the agonizing suffering that traumatized him.

We like to believe that the Buddha's teachings are timeless truths. Suffering seems like a universal aspect of the human condition, rather than a relic of a particular cultural or historical age. But anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists teach us that there are fundamental differences as well as similarities in individuals and cultures. His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was shocked to hear that Americans suffered from "self-directed contempt," as Daniel Goleman wrote in Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health. The Dalai Lama told a group of US scientists and mental health professionals that this experience was absent from Tibetan culture.

We believe, without sufficient evidence, that mindfulness is good for everything from stress to sleep. And we ignore that it originated in a particular sociocultural context very different than our own - 5th century BCE India - with purposes often at odds with the way most people in the contemporary world use it. No one seems to ask whether meditation techniques designed to eliminate the misery of monks in ancient India would be wholly sufficient for cognitively oversaturated lay people in the West in the 21st century who want to raise self-esteem, heal emotional traumas or be more productive in a frenzied world.

Meditation can lessen distractedness, quiet the inner pandemonium, reduce self-criticism and cultivate the capacity to tolerate a greater range of feelings. But emotions such as greed and hatred are viewed in some meditative traditions, such as classical Buddhism, as "defilements" and obstacles that interfere with experiencing a deeper reality. Meditators often try to quiet their minds so as to transcend or get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings, rather than learn what they might teach us. Peter, a long-term practitioner of Buddhist meditation, was raised by highly critical, perfectionist parents, who pushed him to be the sort of person they needed him to be. He felt essentially unloved for who he actually was, yet highly critical of himself. When he first discovered Buddhist teachings on "purifying" the mind of "defilements," he felt right at home. Some years later in psychoanalysis, he realized that the whole project of purification created an unconscious judgment and aversion toward parts of himself that needed to be embraced, explored and understood - not eliminated.

At the first meditation retreat that I ever attended, in the late 1970s, I asked one of the teachers in an interview what to do with the wealth of unconscious perceptions and insights that arose during my meditations. "Don't do anything," he advised me, "just let go of it." I later learned this was a central dimension of the Buddhist method.

This can be tremendously useful advice. Most people spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about the past and fearfully anticipating the future. Letting go has value when someone is hyper-vigilant and over controlled, or caught in obsessive thinking or excessive worrying. But there can be negative consequences when we "let go" of experience.

A well-known writer on meditation told me some years ago that after his divorce, meditation helped him anesthetize his pain and grief. Concentrating his mind during meditation kept his loss and sadness at bay, which he recognized unnecessarily prolonged the mourning process; because he never grieved his loss, it took longer to get over it.

If the way meditation is ordinarily practiced can lead to numbing detachment and self-avoidance, what would a meditation that valued self-engagement and self-discovery look like?

Emancipatory meditation - which involves intimacy with oneself - is an extraordinarily vital and alive activity in which one attends to whatever one is experiencing without any preconceived conclusions about it and without trying to get rid of it. To return to the example of the meditator who was undergoing a painful divorce: In emancipatory meditation, he would be more interested in truly experiencing and learning from his sadness, loneliness and fear, rather than anesthetizing himself or getting rid of his feelings by prematurely detaching from them.

We need to investigate the content and meaning of what we become aware of in meditation instead of attempting to transcend it or reduce it to what we already believe based on Buddhism, psychotherapy or any doctrine. Practicing meditation in an emancipatory way could be a powerful ally in our efforts in the 21st century to live with greater awareness and sanity, intimacy and passion.

Posted with permission of the author.

Check Out "The Couch," A New Blog on Mental Health and Addiction

My partner (read: girlfriend) has started a new blog called The Couch. Jami Parrish, LPC, CSAT, CMC, is a therapist and coach whose aim is to help others live fully and authentically. She's also really smart.

She practices in Tucson, AZ.

Here is the beginning of a recent post:

Affective Neurobiology and Sex Addiction

12/26/2014

“I hate feeling this way.”  She said,  “…it is like I am wired to feel like this.”

I have heard variations of this sentiment many, many times. (Each time I am reminded, Yes! Yes you are wired to feel like this.)  We as mammals ARE wired to feel like this, but that doesn’t mean it is never ending, that there is no hope.  I then explain the process that occurs deep in our brain and she expresses a sense of relief. “THAT makes sense!” she exclaims.   Understanding the underlying neurobiology to our processes helps us not just understand but regulate our nervous systems and those of our clients.  Dan Siegel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology uses this principal as the basis for conceptualization and treatment (Badenbock, 2008)

According to Jaak Panksepp, PhD, ALL mammals have seven primary affective (emotional) neurocircuits deep in the brain.  They are adaptive, essential to our survival, and part of our basic brain structure. (Panksepp, 2014)  While it is relatively well known now that the emotional center of the brain is in the limbic system, what Panksepp has found is that emotions are much more primitive, and hence much more powerful.  The emotional pathways extend far beyond the limbic system into the upper and middle brain stem. (Panksepp, personal communication, 2014)  These circuits reside in “ancient parts of the brain;” they are unconscious, hence the term primary. (Panksepp, 2014; Panksepp, 2012; Panksepp, 2010a)    “All aspects of mental life can be influenced by our primary-process feelings and the overall affective spectrum of the lower MindBrain is foundational for higher mental health issues” (Panksepp, 2012, p. xii). Emotions do not originate by a cognitive process. They begin in basic biological experiences deep in our brains and the subtleties (determining if we are feeling shame or guilt, anxiety or excitement) are then determined by our life experiences and our interpretations (secondary and tertiary processes, respectively, which I will explain below). The term MindBrain or BrainMind is Panksepp’s acknowledgment that we can not separate mind from brain and body. His theory is controversial in the field of affective neurobiology, but his decades of research supports his proposals.  This model will make sense to those who feel their emotions take over and to those therapists working with trauma and addiction.  It also helps to explain the power of sex addiction and other process addictions.

Two Views on Global Mental Health - Evidence-Based vs. Cultural Sensitivity

The two articles cited below were referenced in one of the weekly "best of" lists that I read, sorry that I can't remember which one. But these two articles offer very different takes on the topic of mental health as a global health concern.

In 2010, a team of scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health and the World Economic Forum issued a report on the current and future global economic burden of disease.

In 2010, the report’s authors found, noncommunicable diseases caused 63 percent of all deaths around the world, and 80 percent of those fatalities occurred in countries that the World Bank characterizes as low income or middle income. Noncommunicable diseases are partly rooted in lifestyle and diet, and their emergence as a major risk, especially in the developing world, represents the dark side of the economic advances that have also spurred increased longevity, urbanization, and population growth. The scale of the problem is only going to grow: between 2010 and 2030, the report estimated, chronic noncommunicable diseases will reduce global GDP by $46.7 trillion.

One surprise was that the report predicted that the largest source of future financial costs would be mental disorders, which the report suggested would account for at least a third of the global economic burden of "noncommunicable diseases" by 2030.

Taken together, the direct economic effects of mental illness (such as spending on care) and the indirect effects (such as lost productivity) already cost the global economy around $2.5 trillion a year. By 2030, the team projected, that amount will increase to around $6 trillion, in constant dollars—more than heart disease and more than cancer, diabetes, and respiratory diseases combined. 


The above quotes are taken from a very recent article in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs, "Darkness Invisible: The Hidden Global Costs of Mental Illness." The article is written by Thomas R. Insel (Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health), Pamela Y. Collins (Director, Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health National Institute of Mental Health), and Steven E. Hyman (Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard).

All three of these authors have skin in the game, so to speak - their jobs are based on the existence of mental disorders on a wide scale that must be treated. That makes me suspect of their opinions. 

Still, their article is worth a read.  

In the post that referenced that article, the author also mentioned an alternative view presented by Doerte Bemme and Nicole D’souza at a collaborative website called Somatosphere, "Global Mental Health and its Discontents." Their article was spurred by a then-recent series of articles and conferences on the topic of Global Mental Health.

Recently, an article in Nature entitled “Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health” (2011) identified mental health priorities for research in the next 10 years, sparking controversy and debate about the appropriate methods for establishing priorities, research themes, and interventions in GMH. This year’s annual Advanced Study Institute (ASI) and Conference, hosted by McGill’s Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry (July 5-7 2012) in Montreal, Canada, sought to address these concerns and focused on ways to generate critique of the GMH movement to ensure that its goals and methods are responsive to diverse cultural contexts.

Here is the rest of the introductory paragraph from their article:

The ASI workshop and conference entitled “Global Mental Health: Bridging the Perspectives of Cultural Psychiatry and Public Health.”, was chaired by Laurence Kirmayer and Duncan Pedersen, and was animated with intense discussions about various themes related to the GMH endeavour. The three-day ASI series sought to address ongoing controversies and tensions between a public health approach to mental health (grounded in current evidence-based practices largely produced by high-income countries and exported and adapted to local situations) and a culturally-based approach (which emphasizes local priorities and community-based resources and solutions). The first two days took the form of a workshop bringing together experts in cultural psychiatry, public health and medical anthropology for a consideration of ways to bridge various perspectives on GMH.

The authors present their coverage of the conference discussion "in the form of a debate, giving voice to those in attendance." It's definitely worth the time to read.

Broader Topic

This topic points out one of the many issues with the standard position taken on tackling mental health issues, locally or globally - the opposition between one-size-fits-all, "evidence-based" models approach and an individually and culturally sensitive approach that may not fit the "evidence-based" standards of the NIMH.

Living and working in Tucson has provided me with an opportunity to see this conflict in my daily work. A large percentage of our clients are Hispanic, many of whom are Catholic, but others hold beliefs tied to their indigenous heritage (pre-Spanish influence). Even within our Anglo clients there are wide differences in cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic status, all of which affects their understanding of themselves and of their place in the world.

The treatments favored by the authors of the first article are very often psychopharmacological, i.e., medications, many (if not most) of which create more problems than they solve. For example, antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia (the costliest of the mental health issues faced in any nation) actually perpetuate the problems they are meant to treat.

During the mid 1990s, MRI studies found that antipsychotics can cause basal ganglion structures and the thalamus to swell, and the frontal lobes to shrink. Then, in 1998, Raquel Gur at the University of Pennsylvania reported that the swelling of the basal ganglia and thalamus was "associated with greater severity of both negative and positive symptoms." In other words, this research showed that the drugs cause morphological changes in the brain that are associated with a worsening of the very symptoms the drugs are supposed to treat. (Robert Whitaker, Psychology Today, May 18, 2010)

The effects of long-term pharmacological interventions are often cited to explain the apparent disparity between outcomes for psychosis between developing nations (better outcomes) and developed nations (poorer outcomes). The research cited by Whitaker supports that belief.

In a longitudinal study of schizophrenia outcomes by Harrow, Jobe, and Faull (2012), it was found that "SZ patients not on antipsychotics for prolonged periods were significantly less likely to be psychotic and experienced more periods of recovery; they also had more favorable risk and protective factors. SZ patients off antipsychotics for prolonged periods did not relapse more frequently."

In his Psychology Today article, Whitake cited another study, in Lapland, Finland, which treated first-time psychosis with a very conservative degree of pharmacological interventions- and the results are striking.

Since 1992, the medical community in the western Lapland region of northern Finland has been using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner. At the end of five years, only about one-third of their first-episode psychotic patients have been exposed to antipsychotics, and only about 20% are regularly maintained on the drugs. This is a "continual use" rate similar to the rate for schizophrenia patients from developing countries in the second WHO study, and here are the long-term outcomes for western Lapland's first-episode psychotic patients: Eighty-six percent are working or back in school at the end of five years, and only fourteen percent are on long-term disability. These outcomes are far better than the norm in Western Europe and the rest of the developed world.

Because Finland is a developed nation, this research supports the belief that the deciding factor in why people in developing nations have better outcomes in psychosis is not necessarily due to cultural factors (such as wider family support or better social support), but may largely be due to the pharmacological interventions that are the primary line of treatment in developed nations.

In fact, Parmanand Kulhara (2009), whose research suggests that the difference in outcomes between developed and developing nations is real, notes in his review that “culture should not be used as a synonym for unexplained variance” (Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 2(2); 55-62) - further, "exact factors and the mechanisms subsumed under “culture” that influence outcome and course are still hidden; thus, the “black box” still remains unopened."

It is unlikely that treatment methods in the U.S. are going to change any time soon - pharmacological interventions are considered the primary method, and the only beneficial treatment, for schizophrenia and psychosis.

If you develop symptoms and are lucky enough to find a therapist who understands that psychosis is "a natural though very risky and haphazard process initiated by their psyche in an attempt to cope and/or heal from a way of being in the world that was simply no longer sustainable for them" (Paris Williams; Brain Blogger, Full Recovery from Schizophrenia?, May 29, 2012), you will have a much better chance of maintaining a full-recovery.

Best Psychology & Neuroscience Books of 2014 (according to me)

Here are some of the best books I have been exposed to this year. Obviously, I cannot read everything, so this is a partial list at best. They are listed in alphabetical order. Descriptive text is from the publisher's blurb on Amazon.

A few of these books warrant the RECOMMENDED READ classification.

Adult Attachment Patterns in a Treatment Context: Relationship and Narrative

Sarah Daniel

Attachment theory posits that the need for attachment is a life-long phenomenon that becomes especially relevant in times of crisis or trauma. When adults experience illness, accidents, assaults, psychological difficulties or losses, their attachment-behavioural systems are activated, motivating them to seek help and support from family and friends and/or from helping professionals. However, the resulting request for help is affected and shaped by earlier experiences regarding the support and trustworthiness of attachment figures. Can others be trusted? Is it safe to show vulnerability? How should one behave to increase the likelihood of receiving the help needed? 

Adult Attachment Patterns in a Treatment Context provides an integrated introduction to the subject of adult attachment. Research into adult attachment patterns offers professional helpers a theoretically sound insight into the dynamics underlying a range of client behaviours, including some of the more puzzling and frustrating behaviours such as denying obvious pain or continually pushing the professional for more personal involvement. Sarah Daniel shows how applying knowledge of attachment patterns to treatment settings will improve the way in which professionals engage with clients and the organization of treatments. This book will be relevant to a range of helping professionals such as psychotherapists, psychologists and social workers, both in practice and in training.

Affect Regulation Training: A Practitioners' Manual

Matthias Berking and Brian Whitley 

Emotion Regulation is currently one of the most popular topics in clinical psychology. Numerous studies demonstrate that deficits in emotion regulation skills are likely to help maintain various forms of psychological disorders. Thus, enhancing emotion regulation has become a major target in psychotherapeutic treatments. For this purpose, a number of therapeutic strategies have been developed and shown to be effective. However, for practitioners it is often difficult to decide which of these strategies they should use or how they can effectively combine empirically-validated strategies. Thus, the authors developed the Affect Regulation Training as a transdiagnostic intervention which systematically integrates strategies from cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, emotion-focused therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy. The effectiveness of ART has been demonstrated in several high-quality studies. 

Attachment and Interaction: From Bowlby to Current Clinical Theory and Practice

Mario Marrone

Attachment and Interaction is an accessible introduction to the history and evolution of attachment theory, which traces the early roots of attachment theory from the work of its creator John Bowlby through to the most recent theoretical developments and their clinical applications. Mario Marrone explores how attachment theory can inform how therapists work with their patients, and what the practical implications are of using such an approach. By mixing personal anecdotes from his own experiences as Bowlby's supervisee with clear explanations of Bowlby's ideas and how they have evolved, Marrone creates a memorable and engaging account of attachment theory. This new, updated edition includes new material on bereavement, sexuality and the application of attachment-based principles to individual, family and group psychotherapy. This clear exposition of attachment theory is relevant and valuable reading for trainee and practising individual and group psychotherapists, family therapists and mental health professionals - as well as anyone with an interest in John Bowlby and the evolution of psychotherapy.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Bessel A. van der Kolk 

RECOMMENDED READ.

A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children.

Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring—specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy—and a way to reclaim lives.

Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience

C.U.M. Smith and Harry Whitaker, Editors

This volume of essays examines the problem of mind, looking at how the problem has appeared to neuroscientists (in the widest sense) from classical antiquity through to contemporary times. Beginning with a look at ventricular neuropsychology in antiquity, this book goes on to look at Spinozan ideas on the links between mind and body, Thomas Willis and the foundation of Neurology, Hooke’s mechanical model of the mind and Joseph Priestley’s approach to the mind-body problem.

The volume offers a chapter on the 19th century Ottoman perspective on western thinking. Further chapters trace the work of nineteenth century scholars including George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and Emil du Bois-Reymond. The book covers significant work from the twentieth century, including an examination of Alfred North Whitehead and the history of consciousness, and particular attention is given to the development of quantum consciousness. Chapters on slavery and the self and the development of an understanding of Dualism bring this examination up to date on the latest 21st century work in the field.

At the heart of this book is the matter of how we define the problem of consciousness itself: has there been any progress in our understanding of the working of mind and brain? This work at the interface between science and the humanities will appeal to experts from across many fields who wish to develop their understanding of the problem of consciousness, including scholars of Neuroscience, Behavioural Science and the History of Science.

Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self: The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society

Paul L. Wachtel

Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self articulates in new ways the essential features and most recent extensions of Paul Wachtel's powerfully integrative theory of cyclical psychodynamics. Wachtel is widely regarded as the leading advocate for integrative thinking in personality theory and the theory and practice of psychotherapy. He is a contributor to cutting edge thought in the realm of relational psychoanalysis and to highlighting the ways in which the relational point of view provides especially fertile ground for integrating psychoanalytic insights with the ideas and methods of other theoretical and therapeutic orientations. 

In this book, Wachtel extends his integration of psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, systemic, and experiential viewpoints to examine closely the nature of the inner world of subjectivity, its relation to the transactional world of daily life experiences, and the impact on both the larger social and cultural forces that both shape and are shaped by individual experience. Here, he discusses in a uniquely comprehensive fashioning the subtleties of the clinical interaction, the findings of systematic research, and the role of social, economic, and historical forces in our lives. The chapters in this book help to transcend the tunnel vision that can lead therapists of different orientations to ignore the important discoveries and innovations from competing approaches. 

Explicating the pervasive role of vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives, Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self shows how deeply intertwined the subjective, the intersubjective, and the cultural realms are, and points to new pathways to therapeutic and social change. Both a theoretical tour de force and an immensely practical guide to clinical practice, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students of human behavior of all backgrounds and theoretical orientations.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists

Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman, Editors

Including a chapter by 2014 Nobel laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser 

An unprecedented look at the quest to unravel the mysteries of the human brain, The Future of the Brain takes readers to the absolute frontiers of science. Original essays by leading researchers such as Christof Koch, George Church, Olaf Sporns, and May-Britt and Edvard Moser describe the spectacular technological advances that will enable us to map the more than eighty-five billion neurons in the brain, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in understanding the anticipated deluge of data and the prospects for building working simulations of the human brain. A must-read for anyone trying to understand ambitious new research programs such as the Obama administration's BRAIN Initiative and the European Union's Human Brain Project, The Future of the Brain sheds light on the breathtaking implications of brain science for medicine, psychiatry, and even human consciousness itself.

Contributors include: Misha Ahrens, Ned Block, Matteo Carandini, George Church, John Donoghue, Chris Eliasmith, Simon Fisher, Mike Hawrylycz, Sean Hill, Christof Koch, Leah Krubitzer, Michel Maharbiz, Kevin Mitchell, Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, David Poeppel, Krishna Shenoy, Olaf Sporns, Anthony Zador.

The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

Michio Kaku 

I included this book because it is representative of the state of the science in (mis)understanding the mind. I disagree with several of the basic (reductionist) premises Kaku takes as givens.

The New York Times best-selling author of PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE, PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE and HYPERSPACE tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain.
For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist.

THE FUTURE OF THE MIND gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics.  One day we might have a "smart pill" that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a "brain-net"; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe.

Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about "consciousness" and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness. 

With Dr. Kaku's deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, THE FUTURE OF THE MIND is a scientific tour de force--an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience.

Manifesting minds: A Review of Psychedelics in Science, Medicine, Sex, and Spirituality

Rick Doblin, PhD, and Brad Burge, Editors

Featuring essays and interviews with Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Albert Hofmann, Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, Daniel Pinchbeck, Tim Robbins, Arne Naess, and electronic musician Simon Posford, as well as groundbreaking research and personal accounts, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a "best of" collection of articles and essays published by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Topics include the healing use of marijuana and psychedelics--including MDMA, ibogaine, LSD, and ayahuasca--for PTSD, anxiety, depression, and drug addiction, as well as positive effects of these substances in the realm of the arts, family, spirituality, ecology, and technology.

Among many other thought-provoking and mind-opening pieces are the following:
• "On Leary and Drugs at the End," by Carol Rosen and Vicki Marshall
• "Psychedelic Rites of Passage," by Ram Dass
• "To Be Read at the Funeral," by Albert Hofmann
• "Another Green World: Psychedelics and Ecology," by Daniel Pinchbeck
• "Psychedelics and Species Connectedness," by Stanley Krippner, PhD
• "Huxley on Drugs and Creativity," by Aldous Huxley
• "Psychedelics and the Deep Ecology Movement: A Conversation with Arne Naess," by Mark A. Schroll, PhD, and David Rothenberg
• "Psychedelic Sensibility," by Tom Robbins
• "Electronic Music and Psychedelics: An Interview with Simon Posford of Shpongle," by David Jay Brown
• "How Psychedelics Informed My Sex Life and Sex Work," by Annie Sprinkle
• "Consideration of Ayahuasca for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder," by Jessica Nielson, PhD, and Julie Megler, MSN, NP-BC
• "Psychedelics and Extreme Sports," by James Oroc
• "Youth and Entheogens: A Modern Rite of Passage?," by Andrei Foldes with Amba, Eric Johnson, et al.
• "Diary of an MDMA Subject," by Anonymous
• "Dimethyltryptamine: Possible Endogenous Ligand of the Sigma-1 Receptor?," by Adam L. Halberstadt
• "Lessons from Psychedelic Therapy," by Richard Yensen, PhD
• "Psychosomatic Medicine, Psychoneuroimmunology, and Psychedelics," by Ana Maqueda
• "Talking with Ann and Sasha Shulgin about the Existence of God and the Pleasures of Sex and Drugs," by Jon Hanna and Silvia Thyssen

Memory Development from Early Childhood Through Emerging Adulthood

Wolfgang Schneider

Based on decades of established research findings in cognitive and developmental psychology, this volume explores and integrates the leading scientific advances into infancy and brain-memory linkages as well as autobiographical and strategic memory. In addition, given that the predominantly classic research on memory development has recently been complemented by more cutting-edge applied research (e.g., eyewitness memory, memory development in educational contexts) in recent years, this volume also provides in-depth and up-to-date coverage of these emerging areas of study.

Metacognition: Fundaments, Applications, and Trends - A Profile of the Current State-Of-The-Art

Alejandro Peña-Ayala, Editor

This book is devoted to the Metacognition arena. It highlights works that show relevant analysis, reviews, theoretical, and methodological proposals, as well as studies, approaches, applications, and tools that shape current state, define trends and inspire future research. As a result of the revision process fourteen manuscripts were accepted and organized into five parts as follows:

· Conceptual: contains conceptual works oriented to: (1) review models of strategy instruction and tailor a hybrid strategy; (2) unveil second-order judgments and define a method to assess metacognitive judgments; (3) introduces a conceptual model to describe the metacognitive activity as an autopoietic system.

· Framework: offers three works concerned with: (4) stimulate metacognitive skills and self-regulatory functions; (5) evaluate metacognitive skills and self-regulated learning at problem solving; (6) deal with executive management metacognition and strategic knowledge metacognition.

· Studies: reports research related to: (7) uncover how metacognitive awareness of listening strategies bias listening proficiency; (8) unveil how metacognitive skills and motivation are achieved in science informal learning; (9) tackle stress at learning by means of coping strategies.

· Approaches: focus on the following targets: (10) social metacognition to support collaborative problem solving; (11) metacognitive skills to be stimulated in computer supported collaborative learning; (12) metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences are essential for teaching practices. 

· Tools: promotes the use of intelligent tutoring systems such as: (13) BioWorld allows learners to practice medical diagnostic by providing virtual patient cases; (14) MetaHistoReasoning provides examples to learners and inquiries about the causes of historical events.

This volume will be a source of interest for researchers, practitioners, professors, and postgraduate students aimed at updating their knowledge and finding targets for future work in the metacognition arena.

The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition

Gregory Hickok, PhD

RECOMMENDED READ.

An essential reconsideration of one of the most far-reaching theories in modern neuroscience and psychology.

In 1992, a group of neuroscientists from Parma, Italy, reported a new class of brain cells discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. These cells, later dubbed mirror neurons, responded equally well during the monkey’s own motor actions, such as grabbing an object, and while the monkey watched someone else perform similar motor actions. Researchers speculated that the neurons allowed the monkey to understand others by simulating their actions in its own brain. 

Mirror neurons soon jumped species and took human neuroscience and psychology by storm. In the late 1990s theorists showed how the cells provided an elegantly simple new way to explain the evolution of language, the development of human empathy, and the neural foundation of autism. In the years that followed, a stream of scientific studies implicated mirror neurons in everything from schizophrenia and drug abuse to sexual orientation and contagious yawning.

In The Myth of Mirror Neurons, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reexamines the mirror neuron story and finds that it is built on a tenuous foundation—a pair of codependent assumptions about mirror neuron activity and human understanding. Drawing on a broad range of observations from work on animal behavior, modern neuroimaging, neurological disorders, and more, Hickok argues that the foundational assumptions fall flat in light of the facts. He then explores alternative explanations of mirror neuron function while illuminating crucial questions about human cognition and brain function: Why do humans imitate so prodigiously? How different are the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Why do we have two visual systems? Do we need to be able to talk to understand speech? What’s going wrong in autism? Can humans read minds?

The Myth of Mirror Neurons not only delivers an instructive tale about the course of scientific progress—from discovery to theory to revision—but also provides deep insights into the organization and function of the human brain and the nature of communication and cognition.

Neuronal Dynamics: From Single Neurons to Networks and Models of Cognition

Wulfram Gerstner, Werner M . Kistler, Richard Naud, Liam Paninski

What happens in our brain when we make a decision? What triggers a neuron to send out a signal? What is the neural code? This textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students provides a thorough and up-to-date introduction to the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. It covers classical topics, including the Hodgkin-Huxley equations and Hopfield model, as well as modern developments in the field such as Generalized Linear Models and decision theory. Concepts are introduced using clear step-by-step explanations suitable for readers with only a basic knowledge of differential equations and probabilities, and are richly illustrated by figures and worked-out examples. End-of-chapter summaries and classroom-tested exercises make the book ideal for courses or for self-study. The authors also give pointers to the literature and an extensive bibliography, which will prove invaluable to readers interested in further study.

The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

Giovanna Colombetti

RECOMMENDED READ.

In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. 

In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.

The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment

Beatrice Beebe and Frank M. Lachmann

Technically, this book came out at the end of 2013, but I am including it anyway because it is a RECOMMENDED READ, especially for therapists (according to me).

The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment addresses the origins of attachment in mother-infant face-to-face communication. New patterns of relational disturbance in infancy are described. These aspects of communication are out of conscious awareness. They provide clinicians with new ways of thinking about infancy, and about nonverbal communication in adult treatment.
Utilizing an extraordinarily detailed microanalysis of videotaped mother-infant interactions at 4 months, Beatrice Beebe, Frank Lachmann, and their research collaborators provide a more fine-grained and precise description of the process of attachment transmission. Second-by-second microanalysis operates like a social microscope and reveals more than can be grasped with the naked eye.

The book explores how, alongside linguistic content, the bodily aspect of communication is an essential component of the capacity to communicate and understand emotion. The moment-to-moment self- and interactive processes of relatedness documented in infant research form the bedrock of adult face-to-face communication and provide the background fabric for the verbal narrative in the foreground.


The Origins of Attachment is illustrated throughout with several case vignettes of adult treatment. Discussions by Carolyn Clement, Malcolm Slavin and E. Joyce Klein, Estelle Shane, Alexandra Harrison and Stephen Seligman show how the research can be used by practicing clinicians. This book details aspects of bodily communication between mothers and infants that will provide useful analogies for therapists of adults. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and graduate students.

Collaborators Joseph Jaffe, Sara Markese, Karen A. Buck, Henian Chen, Patricia Cohen, Lorraine Bahrick, Howard Andrews, Stanley Feldstein

Discussants Carolyn Clement, Malcolm Slavin, E. Joyce Klein, Estelle Shane, Alexandra Harrison, Stephen Seligman

The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca

Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar, Editors

This book also came out at the end of 2013, but it is an important collection of articles on a topic that has been taboo in academic circles for far too long.

This book presents a series of perspectives on the therapeutic potential of the ritual and clinical use of the Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca in the treatment and management of various diseases and ailments, especially its role in psychological well-being and substance dependence. Biomedical and anthropological data on the use of ayahuasca for treating depression, PTSD, and substance dependence in different settings, such as indigenous contexts, neo-shamanic rituals, contemporary therapeutic circles, and in ayahuasca religions, in both South and North America, are presented and critiqued. Though multiple anecdotal reports on the therapeutic use of ayahuasca exist, there has been no systematic and dense reflection on the topic thus far. The book brings the therapeutic use of ayahuasca to a new level of public examination and academic debate. The texts in this volume stimulate discussion on methodological, ethical, and political aspects of research and will enhance the development of this emergent field of studies.

Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Why People Sometimes Hear Voices, Believe Things that Others Find Strange, or Appear Out of Touch with Reality, and What Can Help

Edited by Anne Cooke

A report by the Division of Clinical Psychology (BPS)

RECOMMENDED READ. This is an important new book in that the authors have taken a client-centered, relational perspective on psychosis, one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized psychological adaptations to trauma. And it's FREE to download.

Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Why people sometimes hear voices, believe things that others find strange, or appear out of touch with reality, and what can help has been written by a group of eminent clinical psychologists drawn from eight universities and six NHS trusts, together with people who have themselves experienced psychosis. 

It provides an accessible overview of the current state of knowledge, and its conclusions have profound implications both for the way we understand ‘mental illness’ and for the future of mental health services. 

Many people believe that schizophrenia is a frightening brain disease that makes people unpredictable and potentially violent, and can only be controlled by medication.  However research conducted over the last 20 years and brought together in this report reveals that this view is false. Rather:

• The problems we think of as ‘psychosis’ – hearing voices, believing things that others find strange, or appearing out of touch with reality – can be understood in the same way as other psychological problems such as anxiety or shyness.
• They are often a reaction to trauma or adversity of some kind which impacts on the way we experience and interpret the world.
• They rarely lead to violence.
• No one can tell for sure what has caused a particular person’s problems. The only way is to sit down with them and try and work it out.
• Services should not insist that people see themselves as ill.  Some prefer to think of their problems as, for example, an aspect of their personality which sometimes gets them into trouble but which they would not want to be without.
• We need to invest much more in prevention by attending to inequality and child maltreatment.  Concentrating resources only on treating existing problems is like mopping the floor while the tap is still running.

Jamie Wheal - Altered States to Altered Traits: Hacking Flow

Jamie Wheal is the co-founder of the Flow Genome Project, a project dedicated to mapping the states of ultimate human performance, based on the idea of flow states. Flow is a concept first introduced by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) and expanded on in Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (1997).

Altered States to Altered Traits: Hacking Flow

Jamie Wheal speaks at TEDx Black Rock City. "It's never been easier to get high, and it's just as hard as it's always been to stay that way." In this talk, Jamie Wheal, Executive Director the Flow Genome Project, details how rapid advancements in technology, psychology and pharmacology have led to an unprecedented uptick in our access to peak states, and how we might be able to use those moments of clarity and inspiration to learn, do and be much more than we thought possible.

C. Nathan DeWall - Magic May Lurk Inside Us All

From the New York Times, here is a nice essay in the spirit of the season. DeWall looks at the persistence of magical thinking in adults, all of whom would likely deny their thinking is magical.

We typically associate this type of thinking with children, for example, believing that if their parents are fighting it must be because they are bad kids. Another example, from my own childhood, is "step on a crack [in the sidewalk] and break your mother's back." I was really young when I learned that this did not work as advertised.

However, as DeWall illustrates, magical thinking often persists into adulthood. Think of The Secret, as a recent adult example of believing ones thoughts can alter reality. Might as well place your intent on making it rain or generating world peace. Ain't gonna happen.

Magic may Lurk Inside Us All

C. Nathan DeWall | Oct. 27, 2014

How many words does it take to know you’re talking to an adult? In “Peter Pan,” J. M. Barrie needed just five: “Do you believe in fairies?”

Such belief requires magical thinking. Children suspend disbelief. They trust that events happen with no physical explanation, and they equate an image of something with its existence. Magical thinking was Peter Pan’s key to eternal youth.

The ghouls and goblins that will haunt All Hallows’ Eve on Friday also require people to take a leap of faith. Zombies wreak terror because children believe that the once-dead can reappear. At haunted houses, children dip their hands in buckets of cold noodles and spaghetti sauce. Even if you tell them what they touched, they know they felt guts. And children surmise that with the right Halloween makeup, costume and demeanor, they can frighten even the most skeptical adult.

We do grow up. We get jobs. We have children of our own. Along the way, we lose our tendencies toward magical thinking. Or at least we think we do. Several streams of research in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy are converging on an uncomfortable truth: We’re more susceptible to magical thinking than we’d like to admit. Consider the quandary facing college students in a clever demonstration of magical thinking. An experimenter hands you several darts and instructs you to throw them at different pictures. Some depict likable objects (for example, a baby), others are neutral (for example, a face-shaped circle). Would your performance differ if you lobbed darts at a baby?

It would. Performance plummeted when people threw the darts at the baby. Laura A. King, the psychologist at the University of Missouri who led this investigation, notes that research participants have a “baseless concern that a picture of an object shares an essential relationship with the object itself.”

Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that these studies demonstrate the magical law of similarity. Our minds subconsciously associate an image with an object. When something happens to the image, we experience a gut-level intuition that the object has changed as well.

Put yourself in the place of those poor college students. What would it feel like to take aim at the baby, seeking to impale it through its bright blue eye? We can skewer a picture of a baby face. We can stab a voodoo doll. Even as our conscious minds know we caused no harm, our primitive reaction thinks we tempted fate.

How can well-educated people — those who ought to know better — struggle to throw a dart at a piece of paper? Some philosophers argue that magical thinking is, in some ways, adaptive. Tamar Gendler, a philosopher at Yale University, has coined the term “aliefs” to refer to innate and habitual reactions that may be at odds with our conscious beliefs — as when pictures of vipers, snarling dogs or crashing airplanes make our hearts race.

Aliefs motivate us to take or withhold action. You might enjoy sweets, but would you eat a chocolate bar shaped like feces? Dr. Rozin and his colleagues showed that college students would not, though they knew it would not harm them. Our conscious beliefs tell us to shape up, use our wits and act rationally. But our subconscious aliefs set off deeply ingrained reactions that protect us from disease. The alief often wins.

We may have evolved to be this way — and that is not always a bad thing. We enter the world with innate knowledge that helped our evolutionary ancestors survive and reproduce. Babies know mother from stranger, scalding heat from soothing warmth. When we grow up, our minds cling to that knowledge and, without our awareness, use it to try to make sense of the world.

Can magical beliefs offer a window into the aggressive mind? My colleagues and I examined this idea in recent research published in the journal Aggressive Behavior. In one illustrative study, 529 married Americans were shown a picture of a doll and were told that it represented their spouse. They could insert as many pins into the doll as they wished, from zero to 51. Participants also reported how often they had perpetrated intimate partner violence, which included psychological aggression and physical assault.

Voodoo dolls can measure whether your romantic partner is “hangry”— that dangerous combination of hunger and anger. If we let our blood sugar drop, it becomes harder to put the brakes on our aggressive urges. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we showed that on days when their blood sugar dropped, married people stabbed the voodoo doll with more pins.

Do people take the voodoo doll seriously? If they don’t, their responses should not relate to actual violent behavior. But they do. The more pins people used to stab the voodoo doll, the more psychological and physical aggression they perpetrated.

Stabbing a voodoo doll can also satisfy the desire for vengeance, another study found. When German students imagined an upsetting situation, they began to see the world through blood-colored glasses, increasing their tendency to ruminate on aggression-related thoughts. Stabbing a voodoo doll that represented the provocateur returned their glasses to their normal hue. By quenching their aggressive appetite, magical beliefs enabled provoked students to satisfy their aggressive goal without harming anyone.

Yes, children believe in magic because they don’t know any better. Peter Pan never grew up because he embraced magical beliefs. But such beliefs make for more than happy Halloweeners and children’s books. They give a glimpse into how the mind makes sense of the world.

We can’t overcome magical thinking. It is part of our evolved psychology. Our minds may fool us into thinking we are immune to magical thoughts. But we are only fooling ourselves. That’s the neatest trick of all.

~ C. Nathan DeWall is a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. With David G. Myers, he is co-author of the forthcoming book, Psychology (11th Edition).